whitebeard

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Nativity: being a mother today.

The theme for this year’s Christmas Eve vigil of the Comunità dell’Isolotto in Florence, beginning at 10.30 pm on 24 December 2006.

For the first time in almost 40 years, instead of in the open air it will be held at the "Baracche", in via degli Aceri 1.

The celebration will be held jointly with the “F.a.t.e” association which is involved in welcoming and listening to single and immigrant mothers who come to Florence for serious family reasons or because their children are often ill and in need of medical care. This is a way of celebrating how the Nativity is perceived by mothers, the many Marys, who come from far away in search of hope and a better future for their children. Their stories of motherhood blend in with the experiences, emotions, problems and trials of us all, mothers, sons, and fathers of the neighbourhood and of the city-world.

The memory of the motherhood of Mary and the birth of Jesus will be recited by a group of children in the form of a story. This story was written in an educational laboratory and is based on information contained in the Gospels, including the Apocrypha. In particular, the story of the birth of Jesus was given the same status within the stories of other births and son-mother relationships in accordance with an educational approach that seeks to heighten awareness of the humanity of “the son of man” and which frees Jesus and his mother from the realms of myth which have had importance throughout history but which should be reviewed today.

“Maternity” is a heady, intriguing issue. Being a mother does not only involve giving life in the biological sense – itself a great miracle repeated with every conception, gestation and birth. It also implies the regeneration and recreation of every single factor of the existence of humankind; first and foremost the passing on of DNA but, equally, the passing on of the sense of life, of why we live, the why that we all drink with our mother’s milk, the passing on of the memory of the species, the knowledge gained over the millennia, the ability to adapt and relate to others, the tools of communication (speech, mother tongue…) the first moves towards recognising and handling feelings and the spirit of survival (like the search for the mother’s breast to suck, the cry of hunger, our first big job as soon as we come into the world after starting to breathe!)…

Being a mother means giving light, warmth, security, protection and tenderness and much, much more which are part of us all – mothers, sons but fathers too!

But there is an element of risk in all this. The danger of motherhood being a hindrance to the free growth of children by imprisoning them in a suffocating “embrace”. The fatigue of having to metaphorically cut the umbilical cord every day, or even every minute. The suffering and feelings of guilt that come from having to say “no”. The danger of passing on the negative values of society as well as the positive ones. The burden of educating towards a culture of diversity instead of rubber stamped homologation. The difficulty of finding places and relationships for socializing the problems of education and for experiencing maternity openly and not as an exclusive possession, a maternity towards all children and not just towards “my” son or daughter.

Underneath it all there lies the issue of “welcoming” maternity, the “giving of life”. Perhaps more than just a chronicle of history, the story of the Nativity that we read in the Gospel echoes the ancestral sense of rejection that the established society of every era has erected to oppose the noblest values of maternity, not only the giving of life in the biological sense, but also the cultural and existential aspects too. We know how patriarchal cultures exploit women and their biological capacity to give life while spurning the female culture of maternity. And this is why Mary had to give birth in a stable “because for her there was no room at the inn”. But the Gospel also has the spirit of welcoming life being born, expressed by those who are marginalised by established society, for example the shepherds.

And this issue of welcoming maternity is a particularly thorny problem today because the sense of life is based on possession, money, individual success, on a free-for-all competition and on having rather than being, even to the point, perhaps rather extreme, that the society in which maternity takes place today is dominated by the tendency to give death rather than life. This is why all mothers, not just those who come from far away, have to struggle against the current to give life in its fullest sense. Mothers are cosseted, given grants and support but these are little more than sweeteners because their real life gets increasingly hard.

In preparing for this Christmas Eve vigil, we agreed that all mothers are and feel “foreigners and migrants”. Giving life is something that objectively sets the mother apart from the culture of alienation, exclusion and war, while giving life means giving strength to a transition (migration) dreamed of and sought after by many women and men towards a culture of life, non-violence and universal peace. The emergence of female culture, the “giving of life”, dreaming a world in which “The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.” (the prophesy of Isaiah 11:1-10), the affirmation of female subjectivity in every part of society, are our greatest resource. Peace is a woman.

The Comunità dell’Isolotto

Christmas 2006

(Thanks to Donald Bathgate for the translation)
Found here